NHS England chair sees India becoming a global exemplar in healthcare 

India could become a global model for healthcare delivery, with its use of technology and standardised processes helping expand access while keeping the cost of care significantly lower than in many developed healthcare systems, Dr Penny Dash, Chair of NHS England, has said.

“India is probably going to become the global exemplar in healthcare provision,” Dash said in an interview on Health Tech Hour, a healthcare podcast hosted by Steve Roest.

Her assessment is notable coming from the head of England’s national healthcare system and comes as countries grapple with rising healthcare costs, growing demand and the challenge of providing care to increasingly large and ageing populations.

Dash said India’s approach to technology in healthcare was particularly interesting because of the way it can be used to “democratise access to healthcare”. She pointed to the country’s early adoption of standardised operating processes and its subsequent use of technology to enable those processes.

“They are delivering outstandingly good healthcare for dramatically lower unit costs than almost anyone else can, with unbelievably huge populations and unbelievable society challenges and things like that,” she said.

For Dash, the significance of the Indian model lies not simply in the adoption of technology but in the combination of technology with standardisation and scale. That, she said, creates the possibility of delivering care more efficiently across a population as large and diverse as India’s.

Dash’s comments came during a wider discussion on what healthcare systems can learn from each other. She cited New Zealand for its early adoption of electronic health records and work in primary care, Singapore for its use of technology and community-based care, Germany for its use of data and analytics in healthcare purchasing, and Nordic countries for their approach to prevention and primary care.

But India, she said, offered a particularly compelling example because of the scale at which these approaches were being deployed.

The comparison also comes against the backdrop of challenges within the NHS itself. Dash acknowledged that the UK healthcare system has a strong record of clinical evaluation and delivers high-quality care in many parts of the system, but said there remained significant variation in how care was delivered and considerable scope to improve the pace at which successful innovations are adopted.

She said the healthcare sector had historically taken far too long to spread better ways of working. While the often-cited 17-year gap between an innovation being developed and becoming widespread has shortened, Dash said the NHS still had “a long way to go”, particularly in addressing variation between hospitals, GP practices and individual clinicians.

Better use of patient data will be central to that transition, she said. Dash argued that integrated digital patient records could allow healthcare providers to better understand outcomes, compare care and develop more targeted treatment pathways.

She also highlighted a persistent problem with existing electronic health records--much of the information remains stored as PDFs rather than as structured, searchable data.

Dash recalled working on early electronic health records in the 1990s and assuming that patient information would eventually be captured in structured formats. Instead, she said, she later discovered that many systems had effectively become repositories for documents.

The result, she said, is that healthcare systems are sitting on large amounts of information that cannot be easily queried or used to understand patterns in disease, treatment outcomes and patient needs.

For India, the opportunity is to avoid some of these legacy constraints while building healthcare systems around newer technology-enabled models. Dash’s comments suggest that the country’s experience in combining digital tools with standardised processes and large-scale delivery could increasingly become relevant not just to emerging markets but also to mature healthcare systems such as the NHS.